New: Extended Forecasts

Starting today, ESTOFEX will issue Extended Forecasts, offering a discussion and categorical map of a severe weather situation an extra day in advance, allowing visitors to become more aware of the developing situation early-on.
The Extended Forecast is a product that will be offered depending on availability of forecasters and the apparent urgency of the weather pattern.

European Conference on Severe Storms

Next week the 4th ECSS takes place in Trieste, Italy (10-14 September)
ESTOFEX contributes to this conference with two oral presentations and a poster. Three forecasters additionally present a part of their own thesis work. Detailed results on the verification of our forecasts will be presented, as well as analyses of a few interesting recent large hail and tornado cases.
Very interesting talks and posters are scheduled, also from severe storms researchers overseas.
You can find the program and abstracts at the ECSS website

As all of our forecasters will attend the meeting, it is quite likely that no forecasts will be present for most (or all) of these days, starting Sunday 9th. We apology for the inconvenience and hope to be back to schedule by Sunday 16th of September!

Estofex starts objective forecast verification

In the process of "learning how to forecast thunderstorms" ESTOFEX wants to monitor the quality of its forecasts. This is of course done by comparing the weather that was forecast with that what occurred in reality. Since the spring of 2006, lightning location data and (mostly unverified) severe weather reports from the European Severe Weather Database have been plotted on the maps of old forecasts. This gave the possibility to subjectively see if the threat level and thunderstorm areas had more or less been placed correctly.

Now we take a next step, by analyzing all forecasts issued since April 30th 2006. The results can be used to become aware of systematic forecast errors. This data is made available to our visitors as well and can be found in a new section of the ESTOFEX website.

ESTOFEX meeting of November 2006

At least once a year ESTOFEX comes together to talk and make decisions about forecasting procedures, verification, plans for our future, and outreach. The last meeting was from 3-6 November 2006 in Linkenheim, Germany. Four of the five forecasters were attending and one active member.

A lot has happened over the year. In January 2006 we had a meeting in Toulouse where we decided to use newly defined risk levels and a new colour scheme to go with it. Pieter Groenemeijer has been very active programming a forecast map drawing tool, storing the coordinates, a major step that helped both uniformity of the look of our maps, as well as offering possibilities to do verification. It went into use on April 29th. Pieter has started a first verification based on lightning data from the British arrival-time difference system, the well-known SFLOC reports. This covers a large part of Europe, and is reasonably reliable, enough to use it for our purpose. The results will soon be available under a special section of our site.

We decided to make a change to the forecasting scheme (see FAQ). We simplified it by not making a distinction between tornadoes and other severe weather anymore, and we adjusted the unit area and number of events expected for the threat levels. We will likely make another adjustment to facilitate verification, by using a unit radius around a point within which at least one event should happen to verify the point as true. This is not likely to affect the meaning of our threat levels much, but may influence the style of drawing thunder and threat areas.

Other things we discussed were forecast text uniformity (necessary elements, correct grammar, no abbreviations), and the possibility of adding a severe convective weather FAQ, case studies, longer and shorter term forecasts (rejected: lack of forecasters!), outreach, offering workshops, and organizational aspects.
We also decided on enabling this News blog, so that we have more means of informing you of our changes and to have the possibility of issuing statements and reflection on recent major events.

First test of our ESTOFEX news blog

On this page we will issue news about ESTOFEX and we will have the opportunity for additional discussion on recent major severe weather events.